Our Kninja Story

Before it became a reality the concept for Kninja Knetwork had probably been floating around in our brains for a number of years. And through many conversations between ourselves, friends, family, and industry colleagues, it began to take shape and move from that concept stage into making it a reality shortly after we left the QuickBooks Connect conference in San Jose, in 2014.

There are many awesome educational resources in our industry but we still felt that something was missing. We kept hoping that someone would come along and create a one-stop community for education, training, resources and support to help every bookkeeping and accounting professional, all around the world.

As co-owners of our own successful Bookkeeping and QuickBooks training firm we felt we had a good idea of what was needed.

Why? Simple. Because, we had needed it ourselves. We had already done much of the heavy lifting figuring out what worked and what didn’t.

So what were we looking for, you ask?

Our first need was training. We all know our industry is changing rapidly with no signs of a slow-down. If anything, all indications are that the pace of change is going to increase. It is going to get harder and harder to stay current with all of the current changes AND look after providing the best service for our clients. As our own team grew internally, we also felt that we were continuously reinventing the wheel and starting proper bookkeeping training from the beginning.

Our team had lots of experience with QuickBooks Desktop, and so the introduction of QuickBooks Online was a huge disruption. We experienced so much downtime and inefficiency after inefficiency as we struggled to switch our thinking and our workflows.

This last year we also launched an apprenticeship program in our office and found that we were struggling to find them a resource that they could follow step by step to get them up to speed quickly.

And don’t get me started on the Apps and the Ecosystems, and which apps work best for which industries, and how do you put it all together?

We found that we were jumping from one website to YouTube to Facebook groups, to Intuit training, and there was no clear path for us to follow, nor any consistency in what or how we were learning. Lots of good material….lots of people with their hearts in the right place….but no cohesion or organization.

As our firm grew new challenges arose. How do we systematize and create processes for our team so that every client gets exactly the same service level? When someone is on holidays, or off sick, how do we know where they left off with the client, or what communication has taken place, so that someone can get up to speed quickly. Again, no luck finding anything out in the marketplace that could provide us with any guidance.

Our goal when we hired our first team member at AIS Solutions was that we wanted 10. Now that we’ve passed the 10-team member mark, the next target is 20. In order for that to happen, we had to increase the effectiveness of our sales and marketing to get new clients. The website, SEO, and social media – all of it was important, and all of it matters in this digital age. But it isn’t easy to navigate through, and there are such limited resources to access, which refer to our specific industry.

I think you are getting the drift

And so, Kninja 1.0 was born. Did you notice we said Kninja 1.0? That is because Kninja is no different than anything else in our industry. In order to survive, it must continue to evolve and provide our community with the tools it needs today.

Why Kninja 2.0?

At the end of our first year with Kninja we conducted a roundtable discussion with some industry peers whose knowledge and opinion we respected. We also did a survey of all the current Kninja customers asking them about their Kninja experience.

We asked them a number of questions like the ones here:

What do you like about Kninja?

What don’t you like about Kninja?

How could it be improved?

What would you like to see added or removed?

What is the biggest need for our industry and our community to help them?

The goal was to have Kninja continue to evolve and improve to help our community.

And Kninja 2.0 is the result of all of that feedback. What our members told us was 1. They liked the content but felt it was too overwhelming. 2. They didn’t know where to start and didn’t know what they would achieve at the end. Basically, they were telling us to reorganize everything so there was a starting point, a journey and a destination all the while continuing to improve and update the content.

Kninja 2.0 has been re-designed from the ground up.

It is now divided into two completely separate sections.

Section one is made up of five complete programs with a starting point and a finish line. These are 12 – 20-week programs designed to help those at different stages of their career. We have a program specifically designed for Startups, one for Solo practitioners, one for those in Growth mode, those feeling completely overwhelmed with the current state of their business and finally a program specifically designed for firms wanting to move into the Cloud.

Section two is “A La Carte” where you will find lots and lots of free resources along with some many others that require a small investment. There are templates that we use for our own firm and much more. Check them out here.